The Albums of Rosemarie Lincke, a DRK Nurse

Rosemarie Lincke, née von Blanquet, pasted five hundred photographs into two albums. She took these photographs over the three years she spent as a nurse for the German Red Cross (DRK) in occupied Warsaw. In the albums, she presents the journey from Germany eastward, the work and daily life in Wehrmacht hospitals, and, finally, the meeting with her future husband, an SS man wounded on the Eastern Front. Moreover, Lincke’s story includes photographs taken from the roof of the court building on Leszno Street, which housed Reservelazarett V. From that viewpoint, she photographed smoke rising over the burning ghetto, using both black-and-white and color film.¹

When the Museum of Warsaw received these albums, their status changed from personal souvenirs to museum objects, historical sources, and testimonies.² This shift also challenged future viewers to position themselves in relation to the albums. Viewing albums usually involves an exchange of looks, being “looked at” by those whom we make present through the album.³ Thus understood, viewing constitutes a performative practice through which we establish relationships with the past. While working with the albums in the museum, I looked at them as someone who was never supposed to see these photographs. Learning about their author’s fate was not the main reason I held these pictures in my hands. I felt she did not see me and could not return my gaze. The distance entailed a particular kind of pleasure—perhaps a perverse one, or one related to the temptation to judge the smiling nurse.

My main professional tools serve to identify places or situations captured in the photographs and to translate them into data that museum systems can catalog. The structure of this database suggested the questions I could ask the albums as a museum professional, namely questions about the photographs’ specific dates and locations. I could answer many of them with precision, but my “mastery” over the material always proved temporary. Even though these albums, now museum objects, no longer concern her, she herself remains irremovable. I feared getting to know her and felt reluctant to give her a voice. Thus, I made no attempt to reconcile the album images of the burning ghetto with the social snapshots from military hospitals or to adopt the nurse’s perspective. Instead, I preferred to intercept the photographs she took, in order to undertake the difficult task of looking at what I saw as being revealed in them. This gesture did not strip the albums or individual photographs of their disturbing allure. I chose to consider my role of a museum professional not as one that ensures scholarly distance, but rather as one that enables a controlled entry into the relationship with traces of the past, clearing a path for interpretation and inviting others to follow.

Assigning authorship to albums usually proves challenging. Frequently, we do not know who took the photographs or who glued them to the pages; sometimes, yet another person narrates the story while viewing the pictures. We rarely find ourselves in a situation like this one, where we not only know the name of the album’s creator—the person who arranged photographs from various sources according to her own concept—but also have a pretty good understanding of which images she took herself. What is more, we possess negatives for many of the photographs and the correspondence she exchanged with her parents during the same period. Whereas the letters can be seen as a direct record of her experience—including the experience of looking—the albums were created much later. They emphasize different aspects, and the sequence of photographs on the pages does not fully follow a chronological order. Even if some frames correspond to situations described in the letters, the album can transform them into motifs and components of a certain narrative space.

The extent of our knowledge about the author simultaneously draws us closer to and distances us from her pictures. We can see her photographic practice as an embodied one and carefully trace her steps. At the same time, this knowledge encourages us to look “at her” first before looking at the photographs. As though we had an obligation to confirm whether Nazism had shaped these images,⁴ namely to understand what we see in ethical terms through their author’s identity.

Her albums may provoke distrust. As we uncover the pages behind translucent interleaves decorated with a disturbing—yet then very popular—spiderweb motif, we hold our breath, wondering whether we will encounter photographs we would rather not see. While viewing, we search for details that might constitute a presumed code: landmarks of Nuremberg as the spiritual capital of Germany, a Dürer reproduction on a room wall, or a puppy with markings resembling the Iron Cross. Even the abstract pattern on the first album’s cover looks like the afterimage of a swastika. Yet, none of these brings us closer to grasping why the author photographed the burning ghetto from the courthouse rooftop on Leszno Street or why she pasted those photographs into the album.

Whom do we speak of? Nurse von Blanquet? Mrs. Lincke? Rosemarie? For now, her first name seems the most fitting, but not because reading her private papers entitles us to informal address. Instead of trying to understand “her” as a person, we attempt to grasp “who she acted as” when she wrote her letters and arranged her albums. We try to read these personal documents as records of gestures and practices that she undertook as a daughter, an amateur photographer, a DRK nurse, a young woman, and later a fiancée of an SS man. By saying “Rosemarie,” we do not reference a person but assign a name to the figure we observe in the documents she produced—as someone who photographed and wrote.

We can treat Rosemarie’s albums as a display of photographic skill by an amateur who set herself the task of narrating her time in Warsaw exclusively through images, without captions. Before arriving in Warsaw, she already knew her Kodak Retina and Sixtus light meter well. She had assembled photo albums before. During the war, others viewed and copied the photographs she took. People asked her for prints even before she developed the film, and then they glued those prints in their own albums. For instance, we know that her DRK colleague, Helmy Spethmann, made such a request. Rosemarie showed her slides during gatherings; in her letters, she asked her parents to send a Diavist viewer to facilitate this. She also organized a slideshow for DRK nurses using a projector borrowed from SS men. Moreover, she took the official group portrait of Reservelazarett III nurses and “snapped a lot of pictures”⁵ during the facility’s inspection by General Walter von Unruh, the commandant of Warsaw. Though she used a private camera, her photographs circulated, but the actual extent of that circulation remains unknown. Rosemarie also pasted pictures taken by hospital staff and patients, postcards, and propaganda photographs into her albums. She likely finished the albums near the war’s end or afterward. That moment undoubtedly influenced the shape of her story.

Pictures showing a pensive DRK nurse observing the city, or ruins, appear repeatedly in the albums. This motif evokes both the romantic figure of the observer and the type of photographs German soldiers took of themselves in triumphant gestures, visually encompassing the conquered city. What meaning might these images carry in Rosemarie’s albums? “I, who have seen the horrors of war,” or perhaps, “I, who can look at pain”? Seeing itself may form part of this story.

On the first page of the album, Rosemarie presents herself in a DRK uniform: gray dress, apron, cap, brooch at the collar, and a hooded coat for outings. She certainly wears the uniform with pride, but we also know that she would later begin to feel discomfort about this attire, which the head nurses monitored down to the smallest detail. Alongside these official portraits, she includes a photograph with her mother, taken when the mother traveled to Nuremberg to spend Easter with her daughter. The nurses had stayed there from the end of March to mid-May 1941, waiting for the assignment of their next post. We can read the inclusion of her mother’s portrait in this place as a farewell—if we were to learn Rosemarie’s fate only through the albums, we might assume that she did not see her mother again for several years. In reality, Rosemarie did see her family during leaves and took photographs of those moments, which we know from the negatives. However, she did not include these pictures in the albums; the latter appear to concern only the journey to Warsaw. Through the emphasis on separation from her family, the journey seems to assume a formative quality.

Therefore, Rosemarie chose the narrative frame of a journey. After all, her album does not end with a wedding, but with farewell portraits of her colleagues in front of train cars. In this respect, her albums resemble the countless wartime albums compiled by soldiers, which frame the experience of war as a journey.⁶ Albums with cover titles such as Meine Kriegserinnerungen (My War Memories) or Aus meiner Dienstzeit (From My Time in Service) abound with personal or propaganda photographs—marching units, destroyed houses and bridges, still lifes with messtins, joking soldiers, local landscapes, landmarks, and people. Tourist photography conventions of the kind we can label as “I was here, I saw it with my own eyes” transform war into the fulfillment of modern life’s promises: mobility and experience.⁷ Private photography and album-making constituted practices to arrange the unfolding history as part of one’s own path and identity.

In a letter written en route and sent on May 16, 1941, Rosemarie describes moving away from the “German sphere of influence”: a monotonous landscape, impassable roads, crooked cottages, neglected, bony cows, and children begging for leftover bread along the tracks. She seemingly noticed and documented what served to confirm the occupation-legitimizing vision of “polnische Wirtschaft”⁸ and the East as a backward land. On one album page, she pasted several views from the train window and, next to them, a photograph of a boy collecting what passengers had thrown to him from the train. She pressed the shutter when the boy was not looking at her. However, her traveling companions were likely watching, because the same photograph appears in Helmy Spethmann’s album. Did Rosemarie take the picture while talking with them, sealing a shared reaction of the group? Notably, she later wrote to her parents: “This is nothing but begging!,” Or did she rather mean to impress the group with this gesture and define herself as a photo enthusiast in a new situation?

Rosemarie had been freezing in Nuremberg and hoped she would move to a sunny country. In the end, they arrived in Warsaw, “exactly where we never wanted to end up”, as she wrote on May 18, 1941. At first, the nurses stayed in Reservelazarett V, located in the Law Courts on Leszno Street—a building accessed from Ogrodowa Street via a fenced-off corridor of Biała Street and surrounded by the ghetto territory on all the other sides. In a photograph, we can see the Ogrodowa facade behind the smiling nurses, likely returning from their first shopping in the city. From the military hospital’s windows, the only view was of the ghetto. Rosemarie complained about the noise and constant screaming. She felt relieved whenever she could stay in her room. She observed that certain “customs” existed in the courthouse and tried to understand where she had found herself and to determine her place. For instance, DRK nurses could not carry even their own suitcases; she had to grow accustomed to Jewish boys handling this task, and to the ban on responding to their pleas for bread. Moreover, custom dictated to take at least one tram ride through the ghetto, because “one had to see it.” On May 20, 1941, Rosemarie wrote:

So, we went on Sunday afternoon, back and forth. It was shocking! When you go inside, the rest of Warsaw seems like the promised land of cleanliness and order. The houses look terribly neglected and dirty, the windows unwashed, with peeling paint and plaster. … The sidewalks are black with people, but the worst part is the figures sitting next to each other in the gutter and begging. Mostly, they are small children, … small bodies with large heads, skin and bones.

The ghetto is not so much observed by Rosemarie as shown to her from the fast-moving tram car. For her, the ghetto remains what she understood she was viewing—a shocking sight. She describes the suffering she sees as the opposite of order.

Rosemarie probably took no photographs in the ghetto. Moreover, she did not include in her album any photographs taken by others despite the prohibition.⁹ The album marks the beginning of her stay in Warsaw only with a few shots showing meals in the field and moments of rest after daily cleaning of buildings designated for new military hospitals, prepared for the Eastern Front’s opening. On one page, Rosemarie condenses the story of her first six weeks in Warsaw, while photographs from Nuremberg and the journey, covering the same period, fill fourteen pages. Compared to the picturesque, attraction-filled Nuremberg with its landmarks, cafes, and a circus, Warsaw offered little to view. Initially, Rosemarie had difficulties finding her place in the city, as if she could not bear to look at it. On May 20, 1941, she wrote: “We are all fed up with Warsaw, it looks so dreadful! … Ah, everything is so ugly and hideous, without a single spot where the eye can rest and admire the view.” She describes ruined buildings, debris, and trash scattered on the streets, where children rummage through the piles, looking for anything edible. The sight of people in tattered clothes exhausts her, and only the tulips apparently blooming in one place between the military hospital and Kredytowa Street bring her joy. Nurses would walk there to get stew from the field kitchen in the courtyard of the Hunting Society Palace.

In Rosemarie’s descriptions, the state of the ghetto and the rest of the city represent visible signs of (moral) neglect. In this light, we can see her own diligent work as a distinction. In May and June 1941, she worked every day, cleaning hospital buildings on 6 Sierpnia Street, taken over for Reservelazarett III. Initially, she commuted there by tram from military hospitals V and VI, later moving to that part of the city permanently. She enjoyed the place, appreciating its beauty despite the neglect. On May 20, 1941, she noted that “it could become quite pleasant, once everything is cleaned and put in order,” Perhaps she chose to show the beginning of her stay in Warsaw as the effort and satisfaction of cleaning. If so, the story that begins on the next page—the one about Reservelazarett III—also becomes a story about a picturesque, efficiently run hospital that she helped create.

Rosemarie’s black-and-white films contain only three frames from the first six weeks in Warsaw.¹⁰ She placed the photographs only in her second album, between pictures taken mainly in 1942 and 1943. On several pages, she presents the already familiar city—parks in different seasons and landmarks listed in guidebooks for soldiers. During this initial period, she seems to have learned how to frame, omit, and use the camera deliberately to construct an image of what she wanted to see.¹¹ A week after her arrival, on May 27, 1941, she wrote: “We are gradually acclimating. One hardly notices the ruins anymore …. Every day, we discover lovely spots worth a walk in the afternoon.” She walked in the parks and attended concerts at the Lardelli cafe on Polna Street. In a letter written one month later, we read:

In the meantime, we have understood why Warsaw made such a strange and repellent impression on us when we arrived. The reason is the suddenness with which the tall, hideous tenement buildings rise from the plain, without any small suburban houses to prepare one for the sight. The city has almost no outskirts. A street with buildings on one side simply marks the edge of the city, beyond which the Polish plain stretches uninterrupted to the horizon. In this way, we gradually learn the nature of this internally contradictory city, and every day we try to push deeper into it (June 26, 1941).

In the albums and negatives, the only photographs comparable to this description are those of the place where the one-sided development of Polna Street meets Pole Mokotowskie. The area does not constitute suburbs but rather marks the border of a former artillery field. Rosemarie photographed this place from the highest vantage point in the vicinity—the new building on the grounds of Reservelazarett III, where she moved at the turn of June and July 1941. In the albums, views from above both open and close the story of her work at the hospital. In this way, she seemingly tries to present herself as an attentive observer. However, the quoted description raises doubts whether Rosemarie aims to understand what she sees, or instead focuses on her own feelings, which situates her in the position of a spectatress rather than an observer.¹²

On various pages of her first album, Rosemarie twice glued the same portrait of herself taken in the summer of 1942, each time surrounded by different images, as if encouraging comparison. The first instance places her portrait alongside pictures from the early months of her stay in Warsaw: she appears shyly posing in her DRK uniform in the Reservelazarett III courtyard, feeding a horse by hand in the meadow behind the hospital, and laughing, with a camera. Ten pages later, the same portrait reappears next to photographs of Rosemarie sunbathing casually on a beach among male colleagues, along with images of butchered pig carcasses hanging in a locker.¹³ The second arrangement triggers unease, certainly an intentional one. This set of images resembles a frequent gesture in soldiers’ albums: contrasting violence with idyll by placing, for example, pictures of a burning village and servicemen feeding chicks on the same page.¹⁴ If we treat Rosemarie’s albums as a coming-of-age story, then part of that story involves developing a war-related, unsentimental approach to the body.

Around the time of taking this repeated portrait, Rosemarie changed her professional identification. She decided to leave the DRK and take a job with the Wehrmacht as a physical therapist (letter dated August 18, 1942). Her father did not understand this change. In a letter of October 18, 1942, he writes, “I asked your sisters once again to explain to me why you did that, because I am—or was—old-fashioned enough to think that only service in the Red Cross should be an option for you.” Ultimately, the father admitted that Rosemarie was right to value work aligned with her training. She did not want to receive kitchen or office duties, as she had spent most of 1942 keeping documentation in a pharmacy. Instead, she wished to work in an orthopedic military hospital and perform procedures prescribed by doctors, such as massages, which she believed the DRK disregarded. Wartime nursing opened possibilities for women’s autonomy, providing them with new identification models. Nevertheless, they still needed to navigate the difference between caregiver as a gender role and nurse as a profession.¹⁵

At the end of 1942, already employed by the Wehrmacht, Rosemarie returned to Reservelazarett V. Her album indicates this moment with the arrangement of several photographs. With these pictures, Rosemarie seems to demonstrate the special location of the courthouse building, from which she “looks at the living, divided, … and finally dead ghetto.”¹⁶ The photographs show the entrance to the military hospital from Ogrodowa Street and rooftop views of the building’s opposite sides at different times: the inner courtyard where patients rest, Leszno Street around 1941,¹⁷ and soldiers, apparently searching the ruins in 1943. Notably, this picture strikingly resembles the one showing the boy by the tracks, taken en route to Warsaw. However, by the time Rosemarie returned to the courthouse, the building no longer served as a gate to the ghetto. After the liquidation action, the boundary of the “residual ghetto” ran along the middle of Leszno Street; the sealed-off district no longer surrounded the military hospital. The album’s photographic layout constructs a story about space and its transformation, allowing us to make an observation attempt. Simultaneously, it creates a visual effect by claiming, once again, the highest viewpoint in the area. However, Rosemarie staged that viewpoint, as the ghetto no longer existed at the time. Instead, the layout visualizes the formula of seeing the “internally contradictory city” (“zwiespältige Stadt”) that Rosemarie discovered in June 1941.

Rosemarie met her future husband, Helmut Lincke, at Reservelazarett V. He served as an SS Obersturmführer and had sustained a gunshot wound to the leg on the Eastern Front.¹⁸ His mother, DRK nurse Emmy Lincke, also worked at the same hospital. In Rosemarie’s albums, Helmut first appears as one of many guests at social gatherings for soldiers and nurses. A few pages later, we see photographs from his birthday celebration at the military hospital in December 1943. Rosemarie climbed onto a wardrobe to fit all the guests into the frame.

Misunderstandings in the letters exchanged with her parents resurfaced in 1944, when the younger daughters—also working in hospitals—explained to the parents the complex treatment Rosemarie’s fiancé was undergoing. The lack of understanding became evident again when, asked about his plans in case he could not return to service, the future son-in-law revealed his desire to farm the land. These moments remind the reader that the letters came from a daughter who gained independence while living far from home. One might interpret her time in Warsaw as a period of becoming. If she wrote her letters as “Rosemarie,” she likely compiled the albums already as “Mrs. Lincke.” We imagine this transformation to grasp the staged viewpoint she adopts in the albums.

In 1944, Rosemarie’s correspondence with her parents became dominated by efforts to gather genealogical and medical documentation of her ancestors going back to 1750. The records were necessary to obtain permission to marry an SS man, which equaled entry into the “racial elite.”¹⁹ The album references this process through Rosemarie’s physiognomic-style portraits, taken with her camera and sent to the SS Race and Settlement Office.²⁰ These photographs, along with those on adjacent pages, come from April afternoons spent lounging in deck chairs behind the soldiers’ house (Soldatenheim) on Esplanadenstraße (11 Listopada Street) () in the Praga district, run by Helmut’s mother. Rosemarie’s father, who traveled to Warsaw to meet his future son-in-law, greatly admired the place. The tastefully decorated interior, a manifestation of Emmy Lincke’s organizational skills and diligence, had to be left behind to an unknown fate with regret when the household evacuated.

In fact, Mrs. Lincke impressed Mr. von Blanquet far more than his future son-in-law did. Helmut used the language of Nazi utopia and war as a foundational experience, while Rosemarie’s father spoke the language of practical matters. Instead of planning, Helmut tended to imagine visions of the future; he wanted to stay in touch with the land and animals. In turn, his father-in-law encouraged him to study shorthand. If Rosemarie, as the future Mrs. Lincke, adopted the utopian language of those involved in the Osteinsatz—and one can view her albums as the narrative space that such utopias need—then her utopia found realization also through “the broom and the towel.”²¹ The story of the exemplary Soldatenheim leads to images of destruction on the following pages. Perhaps, in this narrative, they also intend to justify the evacuation from Warsaw—to show the loss of work performed (by women) in a colonized country.

We see a pensive nurse set against the ruins at Saski (Adolf Hitler) Square. Following her gaze, we arrive at a page depicting the successive stages of ghetto buildings reduced to rubble, once again photographed from the roof of Reservelazarett V. The shots create a stop-motion effect, reflecting the dynamics of smoke-engulfing and revealing horror. We witness the destruction of the ghetto and, simultaneously, observe a peculiar spectacle: the emergence of a sea of ruins, presented in five carefully glued photographs taken from the rooftop’s highest vantage point. This also marks the climax of the album’s developing visual strategy: recurring panoramas and attempts to encompass ever wider views. If we turn the page, we will see the other side of the internally contradictory city: a shot from the same rooftop toward the Śródmieście district on a sunny day, and a view of Mirowski Square. Both unfolded before one’s eyes when one turned their back to the ghetto.

On the following page, frames from the evacuation of the military hospital surround the image of a relief from the courthouse’s inner courtyard—an allegory of blind justice. Many wartime photo albums that have survived to this day emerged at a point when the war’s outcome had already been decided. Some stories break off abruptly; others begin shaping narratives of German victimhood.²² The fall of the Third Reich and perhaps even the postwar reckoning constitute the perspective of Mrs. Lincke as someone who assembled an album about her Warsaw.

Looking at these albums today in Warsaw demands their deconstruction and a retelling of the story so that they reveal what their maker did not intend. Frances Guerin suggests that detaching the images from the identity of the person behind the camera allows the images to act and helps us become witnesses to what they show; it is not the photographer who bears witness.²³ When writing about visual documents of the Holocaust, Georges Didi-Huberman states that “these images show us something much different than what the photographer himself saw.”²⁴ We include them in a dispersed “constellation of views,”²⁵ which enables us to contact historical time. Rosemarie Lincke functions as the one who “looks and cannot see,”²⁶ while narrating herself as an observer. The effect she stages—the sense of “having seen”—seems to distance us from contact understood as an ethical gesture.²⁷ If this contact aims at openness to a glimmer of truth, one cannot achieve it from the spectator’s position, as it is not a question of “seeing.” Instead, this contact requires a repeated effort to establish a relationship with the dispersed traces of the past. The seizure of the images Rosemarie created and kept, as well as the reconceptualization of the gaze and distance that gave rise to these pictures, are at stake in our struggles with her albums.

Illustrations: Rosemarie Lincke, Smoke from the fire in the residual ghetto, 1943 (Muzeum Warszawy, AN 103980); selected pages and photographs from the albums of Rosemarie Lincke (Muzeum Warszawy, AF 38830/1-273, AF 38831/1-234)